As part of the rapid growth of Internet and World Wide Web use, there has been an ever increasing growth in the availability of online services. Such online services include, for example, online banking online email services, online dating services and online social networks. A number of providers may provide a number of such services. These services are, however, subject to fraud and abuse. For example, some users may sign up for online services using false identification information with the intent to misuse or abuse such services. For instance, someone may sign up for numerous email accounts that are used to generate unsolicited commercial emails, known as SPAM. In other cases, someone may use false information to sign up for an online service with the intent of distributing materials for which the particular online service is not intended. For example, someone may sign up with an online social networking service with the intent to use the social networking service to distribute commercial material. In some cases, such attempts to misuse or abuse online services is automated, where a computer program is used to sign up for such online services and carry out an improper use. Yet another type of misuse that may occur is payment fraud, such as a user attempting to make an online purchase using stolen credit card information.
In order to reduce the amount of fraud and/or abuse, online service providers may use a number of techniques. For instance, an online service may require an individual attempting to sign up for an online service to provide some proof of their identity or perform an action that provides some level of confidence that the individual's intent is not to misuse the online service or services. For instance, in the case of automated attempts to access an online service, many online service providers use what is know as CAPTCHA technology, where a distorted series of characters is presented on a graphical interface and access to the service (or services) is allowed only if the correct sequence of characters is entered by a user and returned to the online service provider's server that is monitoring access to the online services. A number of other techniques also exist. A drawback of current approaches is that they do not provide sufficient assurance that a user seeking to access an online service is who they claim to be. Another drawback of current approaches it that abusers of online services constantly come up with ways of circumventing fraud protection techniques, such as automated ways of defeating CAPTCHA technology.
Users of online services may also obtain different services from different online service providers. When requesting services from such online service providers, a user will set up a profile with each individual online service provider. Each individual online service provider may or may not verify the information included in a user's profile created exclusively to access services from a specific online service provider. Regardless, of how the individual online service providers maintain, process and make use of user profile data, a user having to recreate (and verify, if applicable) a user profile for each online service user wishes to access online services from may be frustrating and time consuming for the user.